| In a contemporary Chinese art scene where ‘Chinese’
is often the selling adjective, Feng Yan’s photographs are a
refreshingly subtle change of pace. Rather than pitch his work with
the tired symbols of red China, Feng Yan embraces a more intimate
and ultimately more effective set of Chinese images, making the
quotidian monumental, favoring faded details and slipshod
architecture, preferring personal and public spaces pregnant with
implied meanings.
With his large-scale ‘Rockery’ series, Feng Yan
forces classical allusion and living reality to share an
uncomfortable silence. As in ‘Pine Car,’ where an evergreen is
pressed to the front of the image in muted tones of gray-green-blue.
Wrapped in snaking holiday lights the tree serves as little more
than a bumper-stop to the off-white automobile filling the
background. In traditional painting and porcelain imagery the pine
is a symbol of scholarly virtue and perseverance, and when ‘Pine
Car’ is placed alongside ‘Zoo Pond’ and ‘Bamboo Car,’ Feng completes
the Chinese scholarly allusion triumvirate of stone, pine, and
bamboo. But set in new, awkward contexts and photographed in the low
light of overcast skies, or a moody interior, they allude to a
conflict of modern times with older values.
In ‘VIP Room’ the tension is less about modern and
classical values than it is about contemporary notions of class
entitlement. A room of sofas shrouded in dust covers is cast in a
palette of muddy oranges and browns. A bare few slivers of blue sky
are allowed in through drawn curtains. The viewer is further hemmed
in by heavy rosettes of drapes at the top of the frame, the
out-of-focus couch arm pushing from the left corner, and a fade to
dark over the carpet of the lower right corner. As if the scene were
not suffocating enough, Feng skews the plane of equilibrium, setting
the whole room on a precarious lilt. The room’s disuse, its waste of
space, and its plush luxury upholstering of unsettling colors, call
its intentions, clientele, and taste into question.
With ‘Inside Drawer’ the viewer is invited into a
more personal space. A pile of pink gloves, rags and capped tea mugs
show a tender daily vignette, possibly a pause in chores, or the
search for that certain elusive necessity that always hides at the
bottom of such drawers. The colors and textures of the objects show
a space that is instantly and inexplicably recognizable as from a
Chinese house. Yet there is nothing that screams ‘I represent
contemporary China.’ As a foreigner it makes me imagine what the
quite space between events in a Chinese home is like.
Though they often seem uncomfortable at first, with
dimensions that call attention to spaces too ordinary to warrant
notice, Feng Yan’s photographs offer a much subtler vision of what
it means to be a modern Chinese person on a daily basis, with the
particular set of historical and contemporary tensions that apply to
the most common moments in China.
Auguest, 2006
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